Max Finstein (1924–1982) was an

America The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...

. Finstein was born in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

, Massachusetts. After serving in the

military A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. It is typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with its members identifiable by their distinct ...

during World War II, he attended

Black Mountain College Black Mountain College was a private liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. The college was ideologically organized around John Dewey's educational ...

, and spent time in New York and San Francisco, becoming friends with poets

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...

, LeRoi Jones (

Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka (born Everett Leroy Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous bo ...

) and

Joel Oppenheimer Joel Lester Oppenheimer (Jacob Hammer) (February 18, 1930 – October 11, 1988) was an American poet associated with both the Black Mountain poets and the New York School. He was the first director of the St. Marks Poetry Project (1966–68). T ...

, among others. He traveled to New Mexico for the first time in the 1950s to visit his long-time friend

Robert Creeley Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Char ...

, and moved there not long after. He lived in

Taos Taos or TAOS may refer to: Places * Taos, Missouri, a city in Cole County, Missouri, United States * Taos County, New Mexico, United States ** Taos, New Mexico, a city, the county seat of Taos County, New Mexico *** Taos art colony, an art colo ...

and Santa Fe, NM, on and off for the rest of his life. His poetry, much of it inspired by the landscape of the

American Southwest The Southwestern United States, also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest, is a geographic and cultural region of the United States that generally includes Arizona, New Mexico, and adjacent portions of California, Colorado, N ...

, was influenced by both the

Black Mountain poets The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid-20th-century American ''avant-garde'' or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Background Although it lasted only twenty-three ...

and the poets of the

Beat Generation The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generatio ...

. In 1967 Finstein co-founded New Buffalo, a

hippie A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to different countries around ...

commune in Taos. He left New Buffalo in 1969 to found a second commune, the Reality Construction Company, also in Taos. Finstein died of injuries suffered when his truck crashed during a snowstorm near Tonopah, NV, on his way to

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

, in March 1982. The “Max,” a trophy presented annually from 1982 to 2002 to winners of the Taos Poetry Circus World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout, was named in his honor.

Works

''Savonarola's Tune'' (Laurence Hellenberg, New York, 1959)
''The Disappearance of Mountains: Poems 1960–63'' (Wild Dog Books, San Francisco, 1966)
''There's Always a Moon in America'' (Cranium Press, San Francisco, 1968)
''Selected Poems'' (Desert Review Press, Santa Fe, 1980)

References

El Palacio

External links

"Oh Max"
–

's memorial poem for Max Finstein American male poets 1924 births 1982 deaths Black Mountain College alumni 20th-century American male writers American military personnel of World War II Road incident deaths in Nevada {{US-poet-1920s-stub